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Gary McKinnon (born 10 February 1966) is a Scottish hacker facing extradition to the United States on charges of perpetrating what one US prosecutor claims is the "biggest military computer hack of all time."[1] Following legal hearings in the UK it was decided in July 2006 that he should be extradited to the US. In February 2007 his lawyers argued against the ruling in an appeal to the High Court in London,[2] which was turned down on 3 April.[3] On 30 July 2007 the House of Lords agreed to hear the appeal[4] and on 17 June 2008 the Law Lords began hearing the case.[5][6] This Judgment was delivered on 30 July 2008 with the Law Lords judging that Gary McKinnon could be extradited to the United States.[7] He was given two weeks to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights before extradition, but the Court halted the extradition for an additional two weeks to allow time to hear his appeal on August 28,[8] which was subsequently rejected.[9][10] His legal team subsequently decided to lodge another appeal, which was granted, based on the fact that McKinnon had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.[11][12] His diagnosis was made in August 2008 by the Cambridge University psychologist Prof Simon Baron-Cohen.[13] On 31 July 2009, McKinnon lost his application for judicial review of the Home Secretary's decision not to block the extradition, and also of the Director of Public Prosecutions' decision not to bring proceedings in the English courts.[14] On 27 October 2009 the Home Secretary Alan Johnson announced he would "stop the clock" on proceedings to study new medical evidence before approving the extradition to give McKinnon's legal team more time to appeal in Europe. [15] An apparent final decision to allow extradition was however announced on 27 November 2009. In a letter to McKinnon's attorney, dated 26 November the Home Office states that, "The secretary of state is of the firm view that McKinnon's extradition would not be incompatible with his [human] rights," and that, "His extradition to the United States must proceed forthwith."[16]
[edit] BackgroundThe Glaswegian-born systems administrator, who attended Highgate Wood Secondary School in north London, is accused of hacking into 97 United States military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002, using the name 'Solo'. The computer networks he is accused of hacking include networks owned by NASA, the US Army, US Navy, Department of Defense, and the US Air Force. The US authorities claim he deleted critical files from operating systems, which shut down the US Army’s Military District of Washington network of 2,000 computers for 24 hours, as well as deleting US Navy Weapons logs, rendering a naval base's network of 300 computers inoperable after the September 11th terrorist attacks. They claim the cost of tracking and correcting the problems he caused was $700,000.[17] McKinnon has denied causing any damage, arguing that he accessed open, unsecured machines, and disputes the financial loss claimed by the US as concocted in order to create a dollar amount justifying an extraditable offence. While it did not constitute evidence of destruction, he did admit leaving a threat on one computer:
McKinnon was tracked down and arrested under the Computer Misuse Act by the UK National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU). Later that year he was indicted by the US government. McKinnon remained at liberty without restriction for three years until June 2005 (after the UK had implemented a new extradition treaty with the US) when he became subject to bail conditions including a requirement to sign in at his local police station every evening, and to remain at his home address at night. In addition, he was banned from using a computer with access to the Internet. There have been no more developments in respect of the charges relating to United Kingdom legislation but in late 2005 the United States began extradition proceedings. If he is extradited to the US and charged, McKinnon faces up to 70[19] years in jail and has expressed fears that he could be sent to Guantanamo Bay.[20][21] He continues to contest the extradition proceedings and believes that he should face trial in the UK, principally as he argues that the destruction allegations are fraudulent and that any alleged crimes were committed there and not in the United States. US authorities deny this, however, and claim that McKinnon is trying to downplay his own actions. A senior military officer at the Pentagon told The Sunday Telegraph: "US policy is to fight these attacks as strongly as possible. As a result of Mr McKinnon's actions, we suffered serious damage. This was not some harmless incident. He did very serious and deliberate damage to military and Nasa computers and left silly and anti-America messages. All the evidence was that someone was staging a very serious attack on US computer systems."[22] [edit] AppealRepresenting McKinnon in the House of Lords on 16 June 2008, David Pannick QC told the Law Lords that the prosecutors had said McKinnon faced a possible 8–10 years in jail if he contested the charges (there were seven counts), but only 37–46 months if he co-operated and went voluntarily to the US. McKinnon also claimed that he had been told that he could serve part of his sentence in the UK if he co-operated. He had rejected the plea bargain offer because the Americans would not guarantee these concessions. Pannick said that the Law Lords could deny extradition if there was an abuse of process: "If the United States wish to use the processes of English courts to secure the extradition of an alleged offender, then they must play by our rules."[23] The House of Lords rejected this argument, with the lead judgement (of Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood) holding that extradition proceedings should "accommodate legal and cultural differences between the legal systems of the many foreign friendly states with whom the UK has entered into reciprocal extradition arrangements".[24] McKinnon appealed to the European Court of Human Rights,[7] but the appeal was rejected. On 23 January 2009, McKinnon won permission from the High Court to apply for a judicial review against his extradition.[25] On 31 July 2009, the High Court announced that McKinnon had lost this appeal.[26] McKinnon's mother claimed that he was suicidal and that he would not survive a U.S. prison incarceration.[16] She has received support from psychiatrist Professor Jeremy Turk of St George's Hospital, London, who said that suicide was now an “almost certain inevitability”.[27] [edit] Support for McKinnonIn early November 2008, a total of 80 British MPs signed an Early Day Motion calling for any custodial sentence imposed by an American court to be served in a prison in the UK.[28] However, on 15 July many of them voted in Parliament against a review of the extradition treaty.[29] In mid-November the rock group Marillion announced that it was ready to participate in a benefit concert in support of Gary McKinnon's struggle to avoid extradition to United States. Organiser of the planned event Ross Hemsworth, an English radio host. No date has been set yet.[30] Many have now voiced their support including Sting, Trudie Styler, Julie Christie, David Gilmour, Graham Nash, Boris Johnson (Mayor of London), Stephen Fry, Jonathan Ross[citation needed], Terry Waite, Tony Benn, Chris Huhne, Lord Carlile, the Liberal Democrats, the Green Party of England and Wales, the National Autistic Society, Liberty and many others. All of these propose that, at least, he should be tried in the UK.[31] In August of 2009, Scottish Newspaper The Herald reported that Scots entrepreneur Luke Heron would pay £100,000 towards McKinnon's legal costs in the event he was extradited to the US.[32] In a further article in the The Herald, Joseph Richard Gutheinz, Jr., a retired NASA Office of Inspector General Senior Special Agent, voiced his support for Gary McKinnon. Gutheinz, who is also an American criminal defense attorney and former Member of the Texas Criminal Justice Advisory Committee on Offenders with Medical and Mental Impairments, said that Gary McKinnon could not find justice if extradited to America from the UK, because of America’s poor track record in aggressively prosecuting offenders with mental impairments. Gutheinz was especially concerned that McKinnon's diagnosis of Asperger syndrome would not be dealt with sympathetically by the US criminal justice system. Gutheinz said, that as an attorney, he had once represented a young defendant with Asperger syndrome, in a US criminal case.[33][34] The British tabloid The Daily Mail has started a campaign to prevent Gary McKinnon's extradition to the U.S.[35] Another UK paper mused that McKinnon was entrapped and is being used as a scapegoat. "You leave scraps around for rats to find and in a short time you will have many, many more rats sniffing around for the goodies."[36] [edit] SongIn August 2009, Pink Floyd's David Gilmour released an online single, Chicago - Change the World, on which he sang and played guitar, bass and keyboards, to promote awareness of McKinnon's plight. A re-titled cover of the Graham Nash song Chicago, it featured Chrissie Hynde and Bob Geldof, plus McKinnon himself. It was produced by long-time Pink Floyd collaborator Chris Thomas and was made with Nash's support.[37] A video was also posted on-line.[38] [edit] Statements to the mediaMcKinnon has admitted in many public statements that he obtained unauthorised access of computer systems in the United States including those mentioned in the United States indictment. He claims his motivation, drawn from a statement made before the Washington Press Club on 9 May 2001 by the "The Disclosure Project", was to find evidence of UFOs, antigravity technology, and the suppression of "free energy", all of which he claims to have proven through his actions.[39] In an interview televised on the BBC's Click programme,[40] McKinnon claimed that he was able to get into the military's networks simply by using a Perl script that searched for blank passwords; in other words his report suggests that there were computers on these networks with the default passwords active. In his interview with the BBC he also claimed of "The Disclosure Project" that "they are some very credible, relied-upon people, all saying yes, there is UFO technology, there's anti-gravity, there's free energy, and it's extraterrestrial in origin and [they've] captured spacecraft and reverse engineered it." He said he investigated a NASA photographic expert's claim that at the Johnson Space Center's Building 8, images were regularly cleaned of evidence of UFO craft, and confirmed this, comparing the raw originals with the "processed" images. He claimed to have viewed a detailed image of "something not man-made" and "cigar shaped" floating above the northern hemisphere, and assuming his viewing would be undisrupted owing to the hour, he did not think of capturing the image because he was "bedazzled", and therefore did not think of securing it with the screen capture function in the software at the point when his connection was interrupted.[41] McKinnon stated the image was approximately 256 megabytes in size, yet that the craft's details were still distinct in the greatly inferior 4-bit color and low resolution he had to reduce the viewing image to appear across his mere 56k modem connection (approximate transfer rate 5.4kbps). The charge that he perpetrated "the biggest military hack of all time" is ridiculed by McKinnon who characterises himself as a "bumbling computer nerd" who undestructively accessed open, unsecured machines while under the influence of cannabis,[42] and that the destruction claims were manufactured by embarrassed US authorities after the fact, in order to meet the dollar amount required to seek an extradition, to make him a poster child and intimidate any snoopers, especially those interested in the alien technology subjects he believed the public had a moral right to know of.[40] At the Infosecurity Europe 2006 conference in London on April 27, 2006, McKinnon appeared on the Hackers' Panel. When asked how his exploits were first discovered, McKinnon answered that he had miscalculated the timezone — he was using remote-control software to operate a Windows computer while its user was sitting in front of it. [edit] NASA documentsIn 2006, a Freedom of Information Act request was filed to NASA for all documents pertaining to Gary McKinnon. NASA's documents consisted of printed news articles from the Slashdot website, but no other related documents. This is consistent with NASA employees browsing internet articles about Gary McKinnon; the records of such browsing activity are in the public domain. The records have been uploaded to the internet for review, and can be downloaded from theblackvault.com. [edit] Radio playOn 12 December 2007, BBC Radio 4 broadcast a 45-minute radio play about the case, The McKinnon Extradition by John Fletcher.[43] It was re-broadcast on 2 September 2008. [edit] See also[edit] Notes
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